The GOD Delusion (8 page)

He
may prefer to call himself an agnostic; but his real name is an older
one - he is an infidel; that is to say, an unbeliever. The word
infidel, perhaps, carries an unpleasant significance. Perhaps it is
right that it should. It is, and it ought to be, an unpleasant thing
for a man to have to say plainly that he does not believe in Jesus
Christ.

Huxley
was not the man to let that sort of provocation pass him by, and his
reply in 1889 was as robustly scathing as we should expect (although
never departing from scrupulous good manners: as Darwin's Bulldog, his
teeth were sharpened by urbane Victorian irony). Eventually, having
dealt Dr Wace his just comeuppance and buried the remains, Huxley
returned to the word 'agnostic' and explained how he first came by it.
Others, he noted, 

were
quite sure they had attained a certain 'gnosis' - had, more or less
successfully, solved the problem of existence; while I was quite sure I
had not, and had a pretty strong conviction that the problem was
insoluble. And, with Hume and Kant on my side, I could not think myself
presumptuous in holding fast by that opinion ... So I took thought, and
invented what I conceived to be the appropriate title of 'agnostic'.

Later
in his speech, Huxley went on to explain that agnostics have no creed,
not even a negative one.

Agnosticism,
in fact, is not a creed, but a method, the essence of which lies in the
rigorous application of a single principle. . . . Positively the
principle may be expressed: In matters of the intellect, follow your
reason as far as it will take you, without regard to any other
consideration. And negatively: In matters of the intellect, do not
pretend that conclusions are certain which are not demonstrated or
demonstrable. That I take to be the agnostic faith, which if a man keep
whole and undefiled, he shall not be ashamed to look the universe in
the face, whatever the future may have in store for him.

To a
scientist these are noble words, and one doesn't criticize T. H. Huxley
lightly. But Huxley, in his concentration upon the absolute
impossibility of proving or disproving God, seems to have been ignoring
the shading of
probability.
The fact that we can
neither prove nor disprove the existence of something does not put
existence and non-existence on an even footing. I don't think Huxley
would disagree,
and I suspect that when he appeared to do so he was bending over
backwards to concede a point, in the interests of securing another one.
We have all done this at one time or another.

Contrary
to Huxley, I shall suggest that the existence of God is a scientific
hypothesis like any other. Even if hard to test in practice, it belongs
in the same TAP or temporary agnosticism box as the controversies over
the Permian and Cretaceous extinctions. God's existence or
non-existence is a scientific fact about the universe, discoverable in
principle if not in practice. If he existed and chose to reveal it, God
himself could clinch the argument, noisily and unequivocally, in his
favour. And even if God's existence is never proved or disproved with
certainty one way or the other, available evidence and reasoning may
yield an estimate of probability far from 50 per cent.

Let
us, then, take the idea of a spectrum of probabilities seriously, and
place human judgements about the existence of God along it, between two
extremes of opposite certainty. The spectrum is continuous, but it can
be represented by the following seven milestones along the way.

1. 
Strong theist. 100 per cent probability of God. In the words of C. G.
Jung, 'I do not believe, I
know.'

2. 
Very high probability but short of 100 per cent.
De
facto
theist. 'I cannot know for certain, but I strongly
believe in God and live my life on the assumption that he is there.'

3. 
Higher than 50 per cent but not very high. Technically agnostic but
leaning towards theism. 'I am very uncertain, but I am inclined to
believe in God.'

4. 
Exactly 50 per cent. Completely impartial agnostic. 'God's existence
and non-existence are exactly equiprobable.'

5. 
Lower than 50 per cent but not very low. Technically agnostic but
leaning towards atheism. 'I don't know whether God exists but I'm
inclined to be sceptical.'

6. 
Very low probability, but short of zero.
De facto
atheist.
'I cannot know for certain but I think God is very improbable, and I
live my life on the assumption that he is not there.'

7. 
Strong atheist. 'I know there is no God, with the same conviction as
Jung "knows" there is one.'

I'd
be surprised to meet many people in category 7, but I include it for
symmetry with category 1, which is well populated. It is in the nature
of faith that one is capable, like Jung, of holding a belief without
adequate reason to do so (Jung also believed that particular books on
his shelf spontaneously exploded with a loud bang). Atheists do not
have faith; and reason alone could not propel one to total conviction
that anything definitely does not exist. Hence category 7 is in
practice rather emptier than its opposite number, category 1, which has
many devoted inhabitants. I count myself in category 6, but leaning
towards 7-1 am agnostic only to the extent that I am agnostic about
fairies at the bottom of the garden.

The
spectrum of probabilities works well for TAP (temporary agnosticism in
practice). It is superficially tempting to place PAP (permanent
agnosticism in principle) in the middle of the spectrum, with a 50 per
cent probability of God's existence, but this is not correct. PAP
agnostics aver that we cannot say anything, one way or the other, on
the question of whether or not God exists. The question, for PAP
agnostics, is in principle unanswerable, and they should strictly
refuse to place themselves anywhere on the spectrum of probabilities.
The fact that I cannot know whether your red is the same as my green
doesn't make the probability 50 per cent. The proposition on offer is
too meaningless to be dignified with a probability. Nevertheless, it is
a common error, which we shall meet again, to leap from the premise
that the question of God's existence is in principle unanswerable to
the conclusion that his existence and his non-existence are
equiprobable.

Another
way to express that error is in terms of the burden of proof, and in
this form it is pleasingly demonstrated by Bertrand Russell's parable
of the celestial teapot.
³¹

Many
orthodox people speak as though it were the business of sceptics to
disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them. This
is, of course, a mistake. If I were to suggest that between the Earth
and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an
elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion
provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be
revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on
to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable
presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly
be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a
teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every
Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation
to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and
entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an
enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.

We
would not waste time saying so because nobody, so far as I know,
worships teapots; * but, if pressed, we would not hesitate to declare
our strong belief that there is positively no orbiting teapot. Yet
strictly we should all be
teapot agnostics:
we
cannot prove, for sure, that there is no celestial teapot. In practice,
we move away from teapot agnosticism towards
a-teapotism.

*
Perhaps I spoke too soon. The
Independent on Sunday
of
5 June 2005 carried the following item: 'Malaysian officials say
religious sect which built sacred teapot the size of a house has
flouted planning regulations.' See also BBC News at
http://news.bbc.co.Uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4692039.stm
.

A
friend, who was brought up a Jew and still observes the sabbath and
other Jewish customs out of loyalty to his heritage, describes himself
as a 'tooth fairy agnostic'. He regards God as no more probable than
the tooth fairy. You can't disprove either hypothesis, and both are
equally improbable. He is an a-theist to exactly the same large extent
that he is an a-fairyist. And agnostic about both, to the same small
extent.

Russell's
teapot, of course, stands for an infinite number of things whose
existence is conceivable and cannot be disproved. That great American
lawyer Clarence Darrow said, 'I don't believe in
God as I don't believe in Mother Goose.' The journalist Andrew Mueller
is of the opinion that pledging yourself to any particular religion 'is
no more or less weird than choosing to believe that the world is
rhombus-shaped, and borne through the cosmos in the pincers of two
enormous green lobsters called Esmerelda and Keith'.
³²
A philosophical favourite is the invisible, intangible, inaudible
unicorn, disproof of which is attempted yearly by the children at Camp
Quest.* A popular deity on the Internet at present

- 
and as undisprovable as Yahweh or any other - is the Flying Spaghetti
Monster, who, many claim, has touched them with his noodly appendage.
³³
I am delighted to see that the
Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti
Monster
has now been published as a book,
³⁴
to great acclaim. I haven't read it myself, but who needs to read a
gospel when you just
know
it's true? By the way,
it had to happen

- 
a Great Schism has already occurred, resulting in the
Reformed
Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
³⁵

The
point of all these way-out examples is that they are undisprovable, yet
nobody thinks the hypothesis of their existence is on an even footing
with the hypothesis of their non-existence. Russell's point is that the
burden of proof rests with the believers, not the non-believers. Mine
is the related point that the odds in favour of the teapot (spaghetti
monster / Esmerelda and Keith / unicorn etc.) are not equal to the odds
against.

*
Camp Quest takes the American institution of the summer camp in an
entirely admirable direction. Unlike other summer camps that follow a
religious or scouting ethos, Camp Quest, founded by Edwin and Helen
Kagin in Kentucky, is run by secular humanists, and the children are
encouraged to think sceptically for themselves while having a very good
time with all the usual outdoor activities (www.camp-quest.org). Other
Camp Quests with a similar ethos have now sprung up in Tennessee,
Minnesota, Michigan, Ohio and Canada.

The
fact that orbiting teapots and tooth fairies are undisprovable is not
felt, by any reasonable person, to be the kind of fact that settles any
interesting argument. None of us feels an obligation to disprove any of
the millions of far-fetched things that a fertile or facetious
imagination might dream up. I have found it an amusing strategy, when
asked whether I am an atheist, to point out that the questioner is also
an atheist when considering Zeus, Apollo, Amon Ra, Mithras, Baal, Thor,
Wotan, the Golden Calf and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I just go one
god further.

All
of us feel entitled to express extreme scepticism to the point of
outright disbelief - except that in the case of unicorns, tooth fairies
and the gods of Greece, Rome, Egypt and the Vikings, there is
(nowadays) no need to bother. In the case of the Abrahamic God,
however, there is a need to bother, because a substantial proportion of
the people with whom we share the planet do believe strongly in his
existence. Russell's teapot demonstrates that the ubiquity of belief in
God, as compared with belief in celestial teapots, does not shift the
burden of proof in logic, although it may seem to shift it as a matter
of practical politics. That you cannot prove God's non-existence is
accepted and trivial, if only in the sense that we can never absolutely
prove the non-existence of anything. What matters is not whether God is
disprovable (he isn't) but whether his existence is
probable.
That is another matter. Some undisprovable things are
sensibly judged far less probable than other undisprovable things.
There is no reason to regard God as immune from consideration along the
spectrum of probabilities. And there is certainly no reason to suppose
that, just because God can be neither proved nor disproved, his
probability of existence is 50 per cent. On the contrary, as we shall
see.

Just
as Thomas Huxley bent over backwards to pay lip service to completely
impartial agnosticism, right in the middle of my seven-stage spectrum,
theists do the same thing from the other direction, and for an
equivalent reason. The theologian Alister McGrath makes it the central
point of his book
Hawkins' God: Genes, Memes and the Origin
of Life.
Indeed, after his admirably fair summary of my
scientific works, it seems to be the only point in rebuttal that he has
to offer: the undeniable but ignominiously weak point that you cannot
disprove the existence of God. On page after page as I read McGrath, I
found myself scribbling 'teapot' in the margin. Again invoking T. H.
Huxley, McGrath says, 'Fed up with both theists and atheists making
hopelessly dogmatic statements on the basis of inadequate empirical
evidence, Huxley declared that the God question could not be settled on
the basis of the scientific method.'

McGrath
goes on to quote Stephen Jay Gould in similar vein: 'To say it for all
my colleagues and for the umpteenth millionth time (from college bull
sessions to learned treatises): science simply cannot (by its
legitimate methods) adjudicate the issue of God's possible
superintendence of nature. We neither affirm nor deny it; we simply
can't comment on it as scientists.' Despite the confident, almost
bullying, tone of Gould's assertion, what, actually, is the
justification for it? Why shouldn't we comment on God, as scientists?
And why isn't Russell's teapot, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster,
equally immune from scientific scepticism? As I shall argue in a
moment, a universe with a creative superintendent would be a very
different kind of universe from one without. Why is that not a
scientific matter?